The post Google: The Information-First Conglomerate appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog. Last week Google CEO Larry Page got the Fortune magazine cover treatment , the latest of many such pieces attempting to quantify Google’ sprawling business.

Given that Google+ results are dominating so many SERPs these days, Google is clearly leveraging its power in search to build up Google+. My source is pretty direct about this: “Google has decided that beating Facebook is worth selling their soul.”).

The post Google Now: The Tip of A Very Long Spear appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog. Yesterday my co-author and I traveled down to Google, a journey that for me has become something of a ritual. Some of you might respond – “Google what ?!”

The post Apple and Google: Middle School Mean Girls Having At It appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog. Apple and Google? Or, if you wanted to change your default browser to Chrome, you had to root around in Safari to do so (Google has since gotten around this)?

The post “Peak Google”? From Thompson’s “Peak Google” post. I waited until this morning to read Ben’s post, which compares Google with IBM and Microsoft, each of which once could claim king of the mountain status in tech, but have since been eclipsed.

101 Examples of Social Business ROI Blog Post A few years ago, I put together a list of social media marketing examples. But the truth is out there…and here are 101 examples of social business return on investment, roughly 60% revenue generation and 40% cost reduction.

The post Predictions 2016: Apple, Tesla, Google, Medium, Adtech, Microsoft, IoT, and Business on a Mission appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog. This will be aided by the widespread adoption of deep links and services like Google’s App Streaming. ” Examples include sensors in jet engines (and just about everything else of industrial significance), exercise and health wearables , and home automation , to name but a few. MORE >>

The post A Month In With The Nexus 4: Google Strengths Emerge appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog. It’s been a month or so since I bailed on the iPhone and went all in on Google’s flagship Nexus 4. For example, I didn’t know going in that the standard keyboard has a “swipe” feature, which lets you quickly drag your finger across the keys as algorithms figure out what words you are trying to make. MORE >>

Of the dozens of meeting requests I received in conjunction with this year’s Interop conference, the one I least expected came from Google. Interop is all about enterprise IT — networks, security, servers, stuff with gravitas — and Google is, well, Google. It’s not IBM or Cisco, but in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. And then there was Google Wave. Google is getting better at this kind of stuff, he said. MORE >>

Seen in the wild (well, OK, on this very site): The “Recommend this on Google” hover box at the bottom is new, I’ve never seen it before (then again, my ads are usually from FM ). It’s what we in the biz call a “social overlay” or a “social ad” – and as far as I can tell, it’s only available to those advertisers who use Google AdSense. MORE >>

He leads off the book with a discussion of the effect of Google’s “personalization” feature on the ranking of search results. Yeah, Google does some customization that you can’t turn off, but is it really that bad? Is Google really filtering my news? I decided to test this by asking a group of fellow info-entrepreneurs to conduct a search for the word Israel in Google News and send me a screen shot of their search results page. Google web / search MORE >>